This book examines how top managers – corporate executives, division general managers and the division's top management team members – influence new business creation in a corporate division. It is written for the aspiring manager, the practitioner, and the scholar.

The book takes the reader into the real world of top managers to explore a relatively uncharted territory in a systematic and comprehensive way. The business realities, the management culture, the corporate philosophy, the organizational politics, the personalities, and the personal priorities of the people at the top are vividly portrayed in these pages. It is not so much that the devil is in the details; it is that the details are the message, which is delivered herein by the top managers in their own unvarnished words.

To whet the reader's appetite, consider two well-known companies in this study – 3M and Xerox. The former is commonly viewed as a paragon of entrepreneurial virtue; the latter as a bumbling icon that fumbled the future. However, as the detailed descriptions in this book reveal, both caricatures miss the mark by a mile and conceal what is really important to understand – the human dynamics and influences that led ordinary top managers to achieve extraordinary results at 3M, and sensible top people to produce less than satisfactory outcomes at Xerox. How and why this happened – and the lessons for top managers striving to promote new business creation – is the subject of the book.